Take out the Papers and the Trash
by ninety6tears
Summary: After the end of the world, Larry Underwood meets a man who knows that the trouble's just beginning.


"Which Larry Underwood?" the man demanded, squinting, after Larry introduced himself.

"What?"

"You didn't do that record? What was it, a goddamn stupid name, _Bite Size Christ_ or something we joked about at the studio…"

Larry blinked, still recovering from the shock of talking to another person for the first time since Rita, and now having to believe this. "_Pocket Savior_."

"_That _was it. I loved that, man, and that single..."

Realizing in the haze of the morning that he'd given himself away that easily, Larry merely bothered with amazement. "You know the _album_? They'd only just shipped out the advance copies."

"You look like one big sweat stain, you know...I was in the business. I'm Richie Tozier."

"...You are not."

Richie shrugged.

"Shit, do one of those...do the upper crust orgy-loving guy, you know..."

"You feel like singing me a song?" he returned.

"I haven't got a guitar. Like hell you're Richie Tozier," Larry groused, though he was pretty sure he was and not pushing much into being aloof about it.

"Well, you can call me whatever you want because I haven't got an audience, just a red-bearded Diet Springsteen right here. How long had you been lying on that bench there? Let's find you a Slim Jim or something."

}

They settled quickly into a kind of partnership in inertia. Larry still meant to get to Nebraska, or it still seemed like a better idea than having no idea at all. But Tozier gave off an evasive energy, humming like a ghost down the dark streets with endless spontaneity and a seemingly bankrupt master plan, and the question always died on Larry's lips.

They found the music store. Richie was the one who thought to break into the office where it looked like someone taught lessons, and the best acoustic guitar in the house wasn't on the sale floor but propped in the corner there, as well as an old cough drop tin that held a little something in a plastic bag with roller paper which Richie promised to share if he was a good little boy. Larry rolled his eyes and then ran his hand over the rosewood of the Martin. He admired the well-tuned sound of a chord or two, but though Richie watched him expectantly, he packed it away in the case and didn't play any songs.

Richie did manage to get him to the piano, though, by doing some one-handed fiddling attempt at "Yakety Yak" he just had to come over and try to fix, starting in with the rollicking left octaves until Richie was picking at the melody with laughing confidence. Richie snapped the beat with his left hand and they were singing it rudely (_you ain't gonna rock and roll no more_) louder line by line.

They took the base of a fat tree for their nighttime rambling, too hot to even think about sleeping bags. Richie smoked one thing and then the other. Larry wondered if he always smelled like a green room. It was a little comforting.

"Why didn't you follow up with me anyway?" Richie asked.

"What?"

"I told you I liked that song, I reached out to get you on the show; the number I got was some girl who said she'd pass the message along and you never called me back."

"I was, um. Dealing with some trouble. You might call it laying low."

"I might, huh?" Richie prompted.

Larry sighed. "Amateur drugs bullshit. I had to run home to my mother like a classic case."

Richie fell into snickering. "Oh, kid, tell me it wasn't _gauche_. Was it the madness or just the money?"

Which was more "gauche," he wondered wryly. "The money."

"Of course. But hey, that's good. Amateur means you're not a junkie and that problem doesn't go up in smoke with the rest of the world."

Larry frowned, thinking. He guessed he would have to remark on it first. "Isn't this a hell of a coincidence? You're just trying to meet me a week before all hell breaks loose, and then we…"

"I guess it makes you something like one hundredth of the people I was trying to get a hold of," Richie dismissed in a wave of mirth.

"Don't play dumb, man—it's like a thousand to one we both survive, and then that we'd actually meet somewhere? That's crazy."

"Maybe. But if you tried on my shoes you wouldn't believe in coincidences." There was a pause, and a shy whisper of a cackle ran through his throat. He drawled, "Oh, to be young, and selfish, and only believe in coincidences. Honestly, I've been trying to figure it out. Why it is I met you. Maybe the question is more of why you met me."

Larry's silence was one of awkward cynicisms, stymied with something a little shakier than that.

"You have no idea what I'm talking about," Richie said easily. "But how about those dreams?...You know we've both had them."

"Nightmares." Larry glanced around in the near-dark. "Who wouldn't be having them?"

"Not just bad dreams. That _man_." There was a note of disgust in there almost like intimate recollection. "A man who's made of the...underside of something. Everything, even. And maybe you've seen the black woman too, sitting outside her house with—"

"Richie, stop it," he snapped, "that's just—"

"A coincidence?"

"You want to get religion you can do it on your own time," he said, but then sighed in a moment, putting his forehead into the heels of his hands. Those dreams had made him sweat like a junkie. He'd chalked it up to the heat and the isolation.

"I could tell you about something you wouldn't be ready to believe, but I guess I'll just paraphrase," Richie went on in this dry sober wisdom that seemed unlike him. "You might've wondered what I was doing all the way up here when the flu broke out. I grew up in Maine but that's only a part of it. See, I had to...fight something there. Me, and these old friends of mine did it, and then we had to go back and do it again later on...the thing is, I keep forgetting that it ever happened. My mind just has a way of doing away with all this. Only, just a few hours before the Captain Trips rumors caught any real wind...I was remembering again. It did my head right in."

In his pause, Richie's sigh shook in and out.

"I had no idea what to think of it and I booked a flight back home without really knowing why—I don't know if I thought I would find any of the others, but I just had to be there, I had no way of reaching them. I just knew that _something..._somethingwas gonna happen. I sure as hell didn't expect it would be all over the country and eating almost everybody. By the time my plane touched down in Bangor there was a lot of noise at the airport, people fighting over the pay phones, grouping together around the news on the TVs…"

Larry was making out what he could of his face. "What are you trying to tell me?"

"I think now, I only remembered because it was like getting back this other half of me, the part I need to go where I'm going. But once you and I figure out we're both headed somewhere, I hoped you might understand why you're not headed my way. At least...not yet."

Larry swallowed. "You don't mean…"

"Who knows, maybe I'll just...collect reconnaissance and then eventually come your way, if it's that easy, but I doubt it. I just know this thing that's happened is a playground for pure naked evil and I've gotta be there to see what can be done." He cut off Larry's exclamation, "It's in my bones, man, it doesn't make a damn difference what I really want to do. Just maybe I'll see you again. I think you're gonna learn what you can do and what you are. Or maybe not. But you'll squeeze out of this some way."

His voice slightly choked now, Larry mumbled, "I don't know where I'm going or what I'm doing. I don't."

Richie was fiddling out a cigarette, eyes trained at his lap, thinking for a while. "You'll figure it out. It's all a big love oven now, you know, you'll find people. People worth figuring your shit out for. You can't even imagine the things you'd do for the right people. Trust me."

}

Larry was sullen when Richie got ready to leave in the morning—not quite feeling the abandonment, but like a crutch had been shaken out of his grasp.

Richie didn't seem to want to talk anyway. When he squinted in the direction of the sun, Larry noticed the brambles of crow's feet growing out the side of his glasses, remembering the widely circulated photo of Richie Tozier in the promo image for a Halloween special he'd hosted: smirking with fake vampire teeth and raising a toast with a martini glass filled with sticky fake blood. It was the same man, but Richie's reflective and diffident age had made him unrecognizable at first. _Jesus Christ_, Larry couldn't help thinking, _I don't know if I want to live long enough to ever be that tired._

But then, just when the man had found the keys again for his four-wheeler and hefted his bag over one shoulder, Larry grumpily threw a soda can at a pigeon that was moving to pick at an open bag of chips he'd left close by, and a shit-eating grin came back to Richie and he said, "Hey now, that was your number one fan."

Larry had to stifle a chuckle.

"You'll do it right, kid. Keep your knuckles to the right faces and don't put your paws in the wrong places." He squeezed Larry's shoulders with one arm, backing away after with a salute. Larry didn't even manage to say anything. Before he knew it Richie was walking right down the street and then walking some more.

Suddenly voracious with melody, he opened up the guitar case without thinking and had the Martin strapped over his shoulder in comfortable reflex. He sat back on the curb, sighed a wistful feeling from off his shoulders, and started to play.

At the first few words of Larry singing one of his own numbers, a song he'd written in Wayne Stukey's kitchen while the rest of the band was snoring through their hangovers, Richie slowed to a stop. From far away he looked both lighter and heavier, a mirage through the thin drug of the music rising from fingers and tongue.

Larry crooned his best notes, and Richie kicked at the dirt, paced a little, lit a cigarette and smoked it. He listened as if in faith. But he never turned back.


End file.
